The best budget forwards to sign in 2025/26 FPL - including Leeds United & Wolves striker gems

Once again, it’s time to pick our Fantasy Premier League teams – and thanks to a host of new rules and changes to the way points are scored, it’s trickier than ever this year. But as 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert, it’s my job to piece together some ideas for the best way to put your squad together.

To start with, I’ve been putting together a string of articles looking at some of the best budget enablers in the FPL – the key cheap players at different positions who can score a healthy number of points all while helping you to afford the Salahs and Haalands of the world.

I’ve already looked at the best cheap goalkeepers, defenders and midfielders – now, it’s time for me to comb through the stats to find some hidden diamonds at the bottom of the list of FPL strikers.

The Wolves & Brighton strikes at the top of the £6.5m pile

I’m going to break this down into two separate sections – the best strikers at the £6.5m price point and the best slightly lower down the scale, because there’s a very clear gap in likely value between the £6.5m forward and those who come in cheaper. There are simply no proven assets below £6.5m, so past that point you’re gambling to some degree.

At £6.5m, however, we can find five strikers who all scored at least 120 points last season and who clearly have some of the qualities required to get closer to 150, which is the target total points for the cheap striker slot if you’re planning to default to three forwards in your starting line-up. If you want five midfielders, then the second section with the super-cheap strikers is more likely to be relevant.

Of the five, I’m counting one out immediately – Nicolas Jackson. He’s suspended for the start of the season and in any case is now likely to find himself right down the depth chart at Chelsea. If he gets a suitable transfer, then he may well become a consideration down the line, but I can’t see any chance that he’s in my starting squad given that he can’t even play in the first Gameweek.

That leaves us with (in order of their points total last year) Raúl Jiménez, Jørgen Strand Larsen, Liam Delap and Danny Welbeck – and picking between the four is an interesting challenge.

My first port of call for assessing strikers is their expected goals and their performance against them, hoping to weed out players who got a little lucky and over-performed for a year or to pick out a player with room for significant improvement, but they’re all pretty close this time around by the key statistical markers – as the table below shows:

Delap was the weakest performer in terms of scoring per game, but that’s largely because he was playing for a team who were battling relegation all season. His conversion rate against his xG was healthy, should be sustainable, and he’ll surely get more chances playing for Chelsea.

On the other hand, once we add a bit of common sense into the equation, we have to factor in the fact that Delap may not even be a Gameweek 1 starter, especially given that João Pedro had such an impressive start to his Chelsea career in the number nine slot at the Club World Cup. When he’s starting games, Delap may well be the best buy here, but until I know that he’s getting 90 minutes on the regular, I’m steering clear.

Applying the same strands of logic makes me a little wary of both Jiménez and Welbeck, too. They’re both 34 and at a point in their careers where they’re liable to drop off sooner rather than later, and Welbeck in particular is likely to be rested and rotated in and out. They’ll both probably be fine signings for spells, but I wouldn’t call them highly reliable picks week in, week out.

Which leaves us with Strand Larsen, who scored a thoroughly decent 145 points last season. There’s a caveat with him, too, in the fact that Wolves’ attack is likely to be weakened by the loss of Matheus Cunha, but his returns were very steady across the season and he seems like the safest bet of the four.

With so little to choose between the obvious options, early fixture difficulty becomes a factor and that alone is enough to steer me clear of Fulham player to start with. Wolves have a middling run of games with a couple of toughies, while Delap and Welbeck definitely get the easier starts. If the signs point towards Welbeck starting for Brighton to begin the season, I think I’m just leaning towards him over Strand Larsen, but it’s very close indeed. This is a position I’d expect to be using transfers on.

Brentford & Leeds strikers make interesting gamblers’ choices at £6.0m and below

Once we go lower than £6.5m, we’re venturing into the unknown, a mixture of newly-promoted and freshly-signed players with no proven Premier League track record – but there are one or two potential bargains that I don’t mind chancing my arm on if my plan is to start with five midfielders and two forwards for the opening weeks of the FPL season.

Of the players coming up from the Championship, Joël Piroe has both the best scoring record in the second tier and probably the clearest path towards regular starts. He scored 19 goals in the league last season from 16.9xG, and has consistently pushed well into double figures while comfortably exceeding his expected strike rate. That’s a promising starting point.

Leeds also have three ‘winnable’ fixtures, on paper at least, to start the season, and while I wouldn’t want to start him against Arsenal or Newcastle United, I can see the case for having him in the squad on a rotational basis at just £5.5m. That’s a price point at which he can enable big spending elsewhere while having genuine upside in his own right.

There’s also a world in which Brentford sell Yoane Wissa and Thiago gets a path to being their regular centre-forward. Signed last summer, a serious injury limited him to just one start and we don’t really know what he can do at the top level, so I doubt I’m gambling on him at £6.0m from week one, but if Brentford look strong and Thiago is starting, the Brazilian – who scored a healthy volume of goals in Belgium and Bulgaria – becomes an intriguing prospect.

Everton have two cheap strikers, and it isn’t clear which one will be David Moyes’ first choice as yet – Beto (£5.5m) and Thierno Barry (£6.0m). Barry bagged 11 goals and four assists for Villarreal in La Liga last season, which would put him in the 120-130 point range if he lead the line for Everton, while Beto has never consistently proven that he’s going to score big on a regular basis. That one blast of form late last season isn’t convincing me just yet.

Barry’s ceiling seems slightly too low for £6.0m to me, but he’s young and if Everton play at their best for long periods he could easily grow into a strong FPL asset who can push a little closer to 150 points. Like Thiago, he’s on my watchlist but I can’t envisage starting him in my first squad.

Transfers, injuries and pre-season form may change my assumptions of course, but for now if I’m picking a cheap striker then depending on my team structure I’m choosing between Welbeck, Strand Larsen and Piroe. All have the potential to score well above their price point and have a relatively low number of question marks next to their names – but there’s so little to choose between the options, and I wouldn’t be shocked if we’re a month into the season and I feel ridiculous for not picking Delap or Barry.